2019: Goals and Ambitions

While last year wasn't the best in terms of posting, I met a majority of my goals. With so much accomplished last year, 2019 will prove to be quite difficult. Or, perhaps things will go my way and everything will get done. We'll see, right?

In no particular order, here are my goals:

1. Acquire flagship sets. I'm specifically looking for reasonably-priced complete sets for:

• Topps 1995
• Topps Traded 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1995, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2012, 2014, 2015
• Donruss 2004, 2005
• Fleer Tradition 2005

That is a total of 15 sets. If I get ten of those, I'll be really happy. Actually, while I'm writing this, 2004 Topps Traded should be on the way, so nine more to go!

2. Have 80 or fewer sets left to complete. In 2018, I knocked about 20 other sets off my want list. Can I get another 20? My new goal is to have only 80 sets that need finishing. I can count 15 sets that have three or fewer cards left to completion. But are those cards easy and reasonably priced to obtain? We'll see.

3. Complete my Pokemon card collection. I only need 12 cards. Let's get this finished!

4. Complete the mini frankenset. I don't know exactly how many minis I have in the set, but I'd like to finish it off. I might be about halfway done, and since I want #1-350, that means I need somewhere around 200 minis. What's really going to make this difficult is that I want to get those minis here in Japan. I could go on SportLots or COMC and grab random minis to just knock everything off the list, but I don't want to do that. Luckily, I recently came across a card shop that has a good number of MLB cards, and prices are decent. Where will that get me?

5. Get team cards for Japan Series and World Series teams. I'm still missing dozens of cards that really should be off my list already.

6. Re-check players with "no" cards to see if that's changed. Several older players have no cards, or at least very few cards. I'm hoping some have found their way onto cardboard in the past couple of years.

7. Get one Nolan Ryan card. I need his 1968 and 1970 Topps cards. If I get just one this year, I'll be happy. If I get both, I'll be ecstatic. 

8. Get an Ichiro or Masahiro Tanaka autograph. I need both of them.

9. Add 3 MLB figures to my player collections. I need 12.

10. Get my Japan set want list down to 100 sets. It's around 125 now. I never really cleaned up the list last year, so there are some things that I can just get rid of. And there are plenty of sets that are near completion.

11. Add at least 3 Calbee or BBM sets to my collection. This shouldn't be too hard. Finishing the 2004 Calbee set would be great, and I've also gotten started on 2003 and 2009.

12. Complete the following tasks:

• Organize my Japanese single card collections.
• Organize my Japanese player collections by year.
• Order MiLB cards needed for Japanese MLBer and Player Collections.
• Order non-sport cards needed to finish off sets.
• Reformat my Japan Type Collection spreadsheets.
• Update/print labels for the Japan Type Collection, and apply labels to cards.
• Update MLB Archives list for 2018
• Update MLB Type Collection for 2018
• Update MiLB Type Collection for 2018
• Verify Japanese MLBer list
• Verify NPB Foreigners list

13. Organize my complete set lists. They're a mess, mainly because perennial full sets like Allen & Ginter and Gypsy Queen are mixed in with one-off insert sets, Diamond Kings, and other set collections.

14. Create some custom cards. I've played around with and actually designed a couple sets, but never printed any. They focus on filling gaps in my collection where cards just don't exist. I'd like to make actual, tangible cardboard cards.

Fourteen goals this year. I've never had a perfect year, but will things change this time? Only.. um.. time.. will tell.

Gotta recognize...